Wind Power is More Dangerous than Coal or Oil

The recent explosions in Massey’s Upper Big Branch coal mine and on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig highlight the tragedy of workplace fatalities. Though improvement in statistical averages do little to lessen the loss of those whose loved ones have died, the American workplace has gotten safer which means fewer will be grieving. The Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries reached a record low in 2008: 3.6 per 100,000 full-time workers. Yet with the recent noted losses in the oil and coal industries, some might think that workplace fatalities could be reduced even more by moving away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. The facts suggest the opposite.

The largest source of new renewable energy is wind power, which accounts for 62 percent of renewable electricity generation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t publish accident data specifically for the wind-power industry, but the Caithness Windfarms Information Forum(CWIF) has created a list of fatalities for the wind industry worldwide. The list is compiled from news reports and is unlikely to be comprehensive.

That there are any fatalities in this industry should not be surprising. Towers for modern wind turbines can rise 300 feet or more and the blades for the rotors extend another 150 feet beyond that. (For comparison, note that the Statue of Liberty on its 150-foot granite pedestal reaches 305 feet.) A single wind farm can require erecting a thousand of these 450-foot structures. How many fatalities have there been?

Taking the CWIF fatalities for the U.S. and removing deaths that are only tangentially related to wind power, shows that there were 10 deaths in the wind-power industry over the years 2003-2008. This would seem to make wind power much safer than coal mining, which had 176 fatalities over the same period. However, much less energy was generated by wind than by coal.

To project changes in workplace safety from switching to wind from coal, it is necessary to know the mortality rate per megawatt-hour. The low number of total deaths in the wind-power industry is undermined by the very low amount of power generated by wind. Adjusting for power production yields a surprising result. On a million-megawatt-hour basis, the wind-energy industry has averaged 0.0220 deaths compared with 0.0147 for coal over the years 2003-2008. Even adding coal’s share of fatalities in the power-generation industry, which brings the rate up to 0.0164, still leaves wind power with a 34 percent higher mortality rate. For the record, the workplace fatality rate for wind also exceeds that for oil and gas on an equivalent-energy basis.

Meeting the 20 percent renewable energy standard from the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill with wind power would require swapping about 800 million megawatt-hours of coal generated current with 800 million megawatt-hours of wind power. Using the recent mortality rates as a guide, we would expect there to be 4-5 more workplace fatalities per year than if there were no wind power at all. Even this comparison ignores the fatalities we could expect from the additional power lines needed for so much remote wind power.

Certainly the impetus for moving to wind power did not come from concern over workplace fatalities. However, the story of wind and safety illustrates an important dimension of the energy debate—there is a lot we don’t know about the impact of forcing dramatic shifts in our energy portfolio. At small levels of production, negative impacts might be overlooked or even misinterpreted. For instance, the energy inputs needed, the environmental costs, and the impact on the food supply were significantly underestimated by many who promoted ethanol as a substitute for gasoline. Now that ethanol consumes roughly 30 percent of our corn crop, these impacts offer a sobering reality check on the previous euphoria.

Further refinements on mortality rates for wind energy may show that it is relatively better or worse than this first cut at the estimates. But what we see when we look deeper is that due, in part, to its unreliable nature, wind power is an imperfect and very expensive substitute for conventionally-generated electricity; that it takes huge amounts of land; and it’s not so good for some components of the environment like bats. The argument for forcing consumers to buy increasing amounts of wind power gets weaker the more we investigate its full impacts.

David Kreutzer is the research fellow in energy economics and climate change at The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis. In this position, Kreutzer researches how energy and climate change legislation will affect economic activity at the national, local, and industry levels. Read his research.

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Wind is a relatively new industry with much less regulation, these numbers that have been presented should be taken into account in regulators decision making progress. For hundreds of years mining and for many decades drilling fatalities were much larger than they are now because of the lack of regulation. I have no doubt that if you look back far enough you would find that "wind", even in its infancy from a regulatory perspective would be safer. All sources of energy are not without their problems as you have very clearly pointed out.

How big a wind farm would be required to power NYC ???….The wind power project will certainly put a lot of money in sombodies pocket, but it wont begin to supply the current population with enough power to survive….Guess we'll just have to get rid of some population…………..

A useful calculation, but I note that your professed Eyes Wide Open calculation becomes oddly myopic when it comes from estimating the entirety of the mortality from coal vs wind (or any other renewable). Even you have to note that when electricity is generated from wind, the industrial mortality is limited to construction and maintenance deaths. Coal is the gift that keeps on giving (or taking, depending on your POV).

What are the near and long-term human and animal mortality associated with acid rain, ash spills, lung ailments, mercury, and radionuclide poisoning (coal burning emits several tons of both mercury and radioactives per yr, the latter much more than any reactor accident in the US). Further, the argument about land use assumes that the inter-turbine land cannot be used for anything; in fact many wind farms on leased private land are interspersed with grazing or crops. The thousands of acres of mountain top removal mining for coal do not seem to rise to the level of concern, despite the challenge that doing anything with the aftermath is considerably more challenging than dealing with an obsolete windfarm. And I assume that CO2 and global warming is not even worth mentioning as an issue (however, I am encouraged that the Heritage Foundation's concern for bat mortality (not high on its list, historically) has risen to this level).

Rigorous trade-off calculations for all energy sources do need to be done, but this kind of sophomoronic, transparently industry-driven boilerplate presents the Heritage Foundation in a poor light indeed.

Why not put your considerable punditry energy into proposing and supporting the core infrastructure that ALL energy sources need to be viable – a national smart-grid system that will allow multiple energy sources to be dispersed (for national security concerns) and the sinks to be supplied intelligently. Think that wind farms generate NIMBYness? Are you prepared for GE's latest and greatest nuke to be built (over the course of a decade) in /your/ backyard? We may have to rely on nukes, but no one wants one in their back yard.

Petroleum-based fuels, wind, various solar technologies, and yes, even nukes will be required for the very near future. However, none of them will be as useful without a new national grid as they would be with one.

In Spain the wind power as source of energy has considerably increased the price of the electricity and it represent about a 15% of the total electricity production. Huge amounts of land are needed, the subventions of the government are very high and this make the price of KW very expensive. The installed wind power in Spain is the second one in Europe after Germany. I disagree very much with the wind energy policy because it is very the expensive and the big extension of land needed for it.

How much energy is required to manufacture and install a wind generator? How long does it have to run just to pay back the energy used to build it? What are the maintance costs? These are questions that I have not seen anyone address. Also with nature being irregular the power from wind and solar are unreliable. So we need backup. Batteries are expensive, would need to be very large and are made of enviromentally unfriendly materials. So we are back to Coal or Oil for backup. So we have come full circle.

The air pollution deaths are hogwash and you know it, RJ. Mckitric released a study this month saying that exact this and estimating next to no deaths.

Gentlemen, "alternative energy" is junk. Wind power is next to useless, highly unreliable, and if the Netherland's latest study is correct, does not substantially reduce fuel use due to the amount of generating capacity that has to be idled. Now, I am all for research. If someone can create a much more efficient solar panel or wind turbine that needs less sun or wind, then we can make the things work. However, investing in the current technology on large scale is nonsensical.

As for your point, Chris. OSHA already highly regulates heights and high-voltage. The regulations are comparable. Therefore your point, while valid in historical context, is not relevant when comparing similar years.

About ten years ago I drove from LA to Ariz., during this trip we passed a huge wind farm not as much as with this spill and where most of the windmills were not moving and others barely moving. In our family we have discussed windmills and other alt. energy all need a back up. Solar panels need a battery backup. The most promising of the ones we have read about is the GEO-THERM idea, but it is very expensive as you have to drill deep into the earth's core. There is risk in anything, ie: more people die in car accidents every year than in plane or train, the reason we hear about the plane and train accidents is that so many die in one spot at one time, this is the same with the oil spill, there is oil leaked from ships etc everyday but not as much as with this spill, the biggest factor that is covered over is that there was help offered and refused, BHO made sure he could use this for his benefit the rest of us be dammed.

Wind power is expensive, will continue to be expensive and the dangers to the tower workers who maintain the wind units will increase dramatically as the turbines age and need more extensive maintenance. Not to mention the dangers to birds and bats from the moving blades (do not be deluded by the apparent slow speed of the blades, in order to "keep up" with the rotation, the tips of the blades are moving at close to 300 mph).

rj – Where did you ever come up with 200,000 deaths per year from fossil plants? There is absolutely no data to back this up,

A recent study showed the number of wind turbines needed to supply just 20% of

our electrical requirments would be 186,000! JUST 20%! That does not include the interstructure need to carry the energy to the people. The amount of land plus the destruction of the enviroment would be astronomical. What takes place when the wind doesn't blow, or the turbines are damaged or distroyed by storms, hurricanes, and torandos? One result is that GE (they will make most turbines), who just happens to be one of the biggest Obama supporters, would stand to make even more money, thus provide even more finical support for Obama and the Dems.

To compare workplace mortality between fossil fuels and wind is absurd. How long has the concept of wind power and the equipment been around? Not long enough to make any creditable comparison

Just as with other left-wing, socialist causes pushed by the radical enviromentalist and the national news media, this is not about providing energy. It's about CONTROL. Control of every aspect of our lives.

Alternative power is blowing in the wind , but how many of the advocates would want a wind farm in their back yard? All they would say is NIMBY. They are for wind power as long as it dosen't effect them. It would probably require the remainder of the state of New York to build a wind farm capable of generating enough power to run New York city. Coal power generated plants can't be totaly eliminated, but we have the tecnology to clean up the emissions. All it takes is the willingness of power plant owners to spend the money to do it.

Wind power is a false economy; a fact that would become readily apparent if government subsidies were eliminated. Wind turbines are expensive to manufacture and their cost cannot be recouped within their life expectancy; the ROI on wind power is a negative number. Wind turbines generate zero power if there is too little wind, *or* if there is to much wind! Offshore wind farms everywhere face stiff NIMBY opposition, even from the most prominent, outspoken and hypocritical family of Massachusetts liberals, the Kennedys.

Alternative energy is great, but the engineering must be viable. Hydro electric is great and generates power as long as the water flows (more head is always better!). Geothermal works great in certain areas, but it's still more expensive than conventional energy (just the installation costs alone can make such projects inviable). PV has been around for decades but is still too expensive and unreliable, and only works when the sun shines (and the panels are free of dust & debris).

We need more nuclear, more coal, and more gas & oil. The engineering is solid, they can be used safely and cleanly, and nothing packs the energy, portability or flexibility of hydrocarbon based fuels.

PS. Why do some believe regulators and their regulations are the solution to everything and can make all the bads things better? Isn't that like BP calling in more lawyers to address the oil spill?

@Vincent Carr: We are not comparing the populations. We are comparing the *death rates* of the different means of power production.

@chris minnesota: We make make wind safer with experience, and maybe someday reduce the occupational death rate to something comparable with coal, or perhaps even as low as nuclear, but wind power will still require vast tracts of land be condemned and rendered uninhabitable for humans and wildlife.

@all: Wind farms consume up to about 60 acres per megawatt installed capacity. Remember that *actual* production will be far less due to maintenance and weather issues.

I'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that presenting faulty and/or incomplete information is an error of omission and not commission.

One of the key ideas that I took away from a graduate level statistics course is that you can make numbers say anything. If you toss in the 10,000 American miners who have died from Black Lung disease over the last decade, what does that do to your numbers? Also, it seems that you are using global deaths in the wind industry vs American deaths in the coal industry (again, without considering black lung deaths this number is worse than worthless) while looking at MWh produced in the US from both power sources. I'm not going to take the time to dig into this, but it seems like a pretty basic mistake if that is the case.

Yes, we are comparing the death rates. You can't take global deaths/American production and compare it to American deaths/American production. The populations are not comparable so the result is worse then meaningless, it's misleading. Also, by ignoring deaths caused by black lung disease and respiratory illnesses in and around coal mines and power plants, the death figure as presented is absurd and also meaningless. The proper way to present this case would be to look at all occupational and non-occupational deaths from manufacturing equipment such as wind turbines and mining equipment to constructing and operating power plants, mines, etc. Of course, if that had been done, this article would have a different title and would be posted on a different blog.

Your statements about wind energy "consuming" land and rendering it "condemned and uninhabitable for humans and wildlife" is completely at odds with the experience of thousands of landowners living, farming, ranching and hunting wildlife on operating windfarms in the United States. That being said, it's OK to have a position on an issue that is based purely on emotion, but it's not OK to make up "facts" to support that position.

A number of posters seem to think that renewables alone receive subsidies and thus will never be self-sustainable. To them I suggest you look more closely at what your representatives have been voting for. In terms of direct subsidies, the oil companies (among the most profitable corporations in history) have been getting more than their fair share.

Google 'oil company subsidies' and read widely. These are /direct/ subsidies, exclusive of the 100s of billions that are spent in providing a militarily pacified environment for oil companies to do business in. And you have to ask 'why do they hate us?'

Energy costs a lot. If you try to hide its real cost by measuring the cost at the pump or the plug, well, you're in the process of being educated. (see BP oil spill, see Operation Iraqi Liberation, see Middle East, see …)

There is no fuel that is as portably energy dense as oil. That's why we need to save what we have for those uses that require it (flight, for example) and start using other fuels for land-based energy or power generation.

Clean coal? A fantasy that has as much chance of implementation as production fusion. There /are/ some remarkable nuclear fission technologies that have been sidetracked/mothballed because they did not produce enough weaponizable isotopes (the thorium cycle is one; the Integral Fast Reactor is another). The IFR can use weapons-grade cores for fuel, and use most of the inherent energy in them (as opposed to ~1% of the energy via current light water reactors), tho it's a very dirty, expensive, dangerous process. Because of that, it will be at least 20 yrs before a commercial IFR reactor produces its 1st electron of power in the US. Ditto thorium (tho it's a much safer technology). Until then we should be working on the technologies that have good return on investment and whose risks are fairly well understood.

Oil is dirty and drilling offshore has some inherent risk. It currently consumes massive amounts of military and government support to extract and by most accounts, we've passed peak oil anyway. It will be getting more expensive, especially as the 3rd world transitions to the 1st world and emulates our massive energy consumption.

Coal is widely available, but among the dirtiest of fuels by just about any measure. (Clean Coal = Black White = Big Small etc). You can produce C02-free energy from coal, but it will take a huge proportion of the energy produced to do it.

Residential Solar PV is expensive and relatively low-yield, but if incorporated into a 30yr mortgage, it is economical, especially when compared to the costs of a new power station.

Thermal Solar is much more efficient, produces fewer environmental emissions, but requires huge (desert) areas for deployment and like any solar technology, is inherently (but regularly) intermittent.

Wind is very well understood (same technology level as a car) and self contained, and extremely clean but also requires massive deployment for a real contribution and is often intermittent.

Geothermal is an attractive technology but only suited for relatively restricted areas.

And as I noted previously, for any of the above-mentioned energy sources to be exploited and to be available to residential and industrial users requires a MASSIVE RE-ENGINEERING AND RESTRUCTURING OF OUR NATIONAL ELECTRIC GRID to allow electrons from the wind farms of Wyoming to power the big screen TVs of Tennessee and for the nukes in Nevada to supply the washing machines in .. Washington.

All dispersed, local power generation simultaneously improves our national security position. Low density, low energy targets are less attractive than high-density, high energy targets. Another reason to try to spread out the national power generation.

Why is it that self-described 'conservatives' seems to have an impulsive revulsion for conservation?

Since when did a strict comparison of deaths due to a certain industry become a discussion about whether or not we should implement alternative energy policies? If the writer were to write about whether or not to implement alternative energy sources, then I welcome your discussion, until then…

The comments, here, pretty much cover the whole debate over renewable energy. So, I won't respond to all of them in this blog post.

To Vincent Carr: I see where you might get your misconception since the CWIF covers the whole world (as best they can). However, the wind-power deaths used for our calculations were only those that occured in the U.S. The total number in the CWIF database was much higher.

[…] The Caithness Windfarms Information Forum (CWIF) has compiled a list of worldwide fatalities related to the wind industry. Based on the number of deaths per megawatt-hour produced, wind energy is more deadly than traditional power. […]

David, it's good to know that you only include US wind deaths in the study. However, I still think it's misleading to not consider CWP deaths. Black Lung disease has declined since the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, but the decline has stopped and the disease in on the rise again. Over the last 10 years, I've read that 10,000 American miners have died from Black Lung. I think leaving them out of your numbers makes coal look a lot more warm and fuzzy than it really is. It strikes me as the equivalent of examining the safety record of an airline for a year in which 3 of their planes crashed and 350 people were killed and coming to the conclusion that no changes are needed because only 6 of their employees died. If you don't like wind, you don't like wind, but please, don't sugarcoat coal power. I think that's one industry that's gotten more help than it deserves over the years.

interesting study. i do, however, notice that there seems to be an unquestioned assumption, or perhaps red herring, that alternative energy is going to be "forced" on the "industry" as an "intrusion" of government, distorting the "marketplace." i do not see any acknowledgement that there is already in place a substantial intrusion of government, and has been for decades, into that "industry" through huge subsidies, tax breaks, etc. It is like the trains versus planes debate. We subsidize airplanes to the extent that they become the default option for travel (they were not when i was growing up in the 40s and 50s – they were elite). Now, if there is talk of supporting train travel, there is griping about government pressure. So after years of government coddling, anything that will turn us towards less polluting or limited sources is seen as in principle meddling. What i am sensing is a typical "conservative" response to things which is, "I like things fine the way they are (no matter how they got that way)" and any change is "liberal" or "activist." Cf. Tea Partiers complaining that "obamacare" is going to hurt their Medicare.

Finally, work place safety was not the issue with BP in the first place. So why the big deal?

We really need to be realistic and stop being brain washed about this 'green" aspect of wind power. First of all, green wind energy is an artificially created market, by bankers, Wall St, lobbyists and mainly foreign turbine makers (it is the same in other counties.) There are so many subsidies, tax breaks, tax credits, deferred tax schemes, tax shelters (9 years worth) that this is an attractive goodie bag for wealthy investors and companies that don't pay US taxes……and then there are the Subsidies from DOE, and even the Department of Agriculture! What? You didn't know wind was a commodity. And the icing on this free cake is REC's…that is renewable energy credits which sell for $5.00 per on open markets….so essentially a wind company can build the plant almost for free…..have a mandated buyer (most state utility companies) and then resell what he already sold for additional profit. Guys, this is a major green scam…and the green in wind power is not in goodness or values, it is greenbacks.

Likewise, I suppose I could make chainsaws look 34% safer than Nerf balls if I narrowed in on a small amount of data. For an political philosophy that is deeply suspicious of oversimplifying the many and complex unintended consequences, this article seems… the exact opposite. The anti-wind slant is painfully obvious.

Expanding our view of the danger of competing energy systems even slightly shows how. One obvious concern for human mortality is the effect of air pollution from energy generation. Operating wind turbines don't change the composition of the air; although there is pollution (scenic, noise), it doesn't appear to kill anyone.

Let's take a recent estimate of 13,200 deaths a year from coal combustion (http://washingtonindependent.com/97196/study-predicts-13200-deaths-from-coal-pollutants-this-year). I think it's fair to say that anyone who denies that air pollution has any role in adverse health effects (including death) doesn't understand or simply denies the scientific method. But since the estimate was made by a wind-loving, tree-hugging environmental non-profit, let's say they overestimated by a factor of *ten*, and the real figure is more like 1,320.

We then have 1,496 (1320+176) coal deaths, divided by 11957.679 million MWh, for a Deaths/Million MWh of 0.1251. Coal is now 569% more deadly than wind (0.0220).

Ditto "chris minnesota"' comment about safety regulations & best practices for windmill construction. The industry has pretty paltry experience compared to many decades of coal mining. Of course things will be more dangerous at the beginning of the learning curve.

Heritage & Authors: Please do not promote ideology in the guise of intellectual thought and careful analysis. You do everyone a disservice, especially the 1,320 – 13,200 Americans (disproportionately the elderly & children) who will die from the effects of coal combustion this year.

What a piece of joke the Heritage Foundation is showing the world. David Kreutzer can live near a coal power plant if he wishes. The rest of us would rather be living near a "dangerous" wind farm. If you can find a way to remove the harmful effect of fossil fuels and the harmful effect to the environment, then come back and tell us how "cheap" coal is. And for that matter, unless all the people associated with the Heritage Foundation is willing to let their family live near a coal power plant, I would really appreciate you don't put out propaganda that distort facts and leave out important factors.

The call to reduce the use of thermal coal (steam coal) is valid for western countries but unfortunately, coal reports show developing economies are more likely to increase their use of thermal coal and metallurgical coal in coming years because of its affordability and to meet increasing demands for electricity and steel.

Lies, damned lies, and then more lies on top of those. You'd think his nose would have been too long to reach the keyboard.

Wind farms take up about 0.01% of the land they are erected on. The rest remains suitable for virtually every purpose it might previously have been used for: hunting, snowmobiling, grazing livestock, growing crops or just sitting their looking shabby if that was the case. A gigawatt of wind power actually takes up about 440×100 meters. http://www.quora.com/How-much-land-does-1-gigawat…

I am no scientist but merely a young 17 year old and i was just wondering that many auto mobiles have decided to switch to electricity.Would this not be more dangerous to the environment as electricity is mainly derived from the burning of fossil fuels . As no machine is 100 % efficient do we not loose more energy as more conversions of energy take place ? sorry i know this is off topic but i was just wondering and decided to ask the question here only as the discussion is on energy .

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